BigShinyThing

“Nicole Kidman: My Choice”, reads the Omega ad. Indeed.

Now that’s progress. We never thought we’d have David Beckham to thank for anything but he’s done sterling work in this area. According to ContactMusic:

Daniel Craig has urged movie bosses to modernize the upcoming Bond series by including gay scenes involving the superspy.

The blond Bond has reportedly made it clear to studio chiefs he has no inhibition doing film a full frontal nude scene to please both his male and female admirers in the follow-up to Casino Royale.

“Why not? I think in this day and age, fans would have accepted it,” Contactmusic quoted him as saying.

“I mean, look at (British TV series) Doctor Who — that has had gay scenes in it and no one blinks an eye,” he added.”

Source: Towleroad.

The Simpsons envisages a future (now?) where iPods take over humanity. Via Plasticbag.

Last year the New York Times wrote a story about so-called Gold Farms — factories where Chinese workers would labour through the initial stages of MMORPGs like World of Warcraft on behalf of wealthy Westerners who couldn’t be arsed. Well now Amazon have taken that model and formed a new business out of it.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk is named after an automaton from the 18th century, ‘the Turk’, which could play chess. The wooden man, compete with turban, appeared to be powered by clockwork and even check-mated Benjamin Franklin at one point. The Turk was — of course — a fraud, with a human chess expert hidden in the rather obvious, rather huge box on which the model sat. Amazon have no interest in hiding their wizards in this way. For fees ranging from a few cents and not much more, workers — who call themselves ‘turkers’ — will perform menial, time-consuming tasks — such as identifying nuances in colour or shape — which can still confound automated computer systems. Originally conceived by Amazon to assist its own sites, Mturk.com is now a marketplace where many companies ‘employ’ workers to do everything from transcribing podcasts for 19 cents a minute to writing blog posts for 50 cents. Amazon, of course, takes a cut for every task performed.

Amazon says that Mturk provider “artificial artificial intelligence” which as a zeitgeist phrase is sure to produce more than one dissertation. According to Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations for Amazon Web Services,

From a philosophical perspective, it’s really turning the traditional computing paradigm on its head. Usually people get help from computers to do tasks. In this case, it is computers getting help from people to do tasks.

Like all crowdsourcing, turking seems to thrive by provoking people’s need to contribute — to be part of something bigger. To test this, UCLA Design/Media Arts grad student Aaron Koblin invited turkers to draw up to five sheep at the rate of 2 cents apiece. Over 40 days and 40 nights, the sheep flooded in at a rate of 11 per hour. By the end of experiment, 7,599 turkers had participated. He collected 12,000 sheep and put 10,000 of them up for sale at a rate of $20 for 20 sheep at The Sheep Market. This blatant profiteering had some turkers up in arms: “they’re selling our sheep!” was the cry on one message board. Another poster wrote, “Does anyone remember signing over the rights to the drawings?”. Of course they had. If there was ever a moral lesson to be learnt from Web 2.0, it’s always check the IP clauses. But even after the student stopped taking admissions for sheep, and after ruthlessly exploiting his workers, more people wrote to him wanting to contribute sheep for free. Koblin says:

“Most of these people clearly weren’t in it for the money. They weren’t doing it so they could get 2 cents. It was more about participating in something larger.

This is of course the philanthropic view. A more cynical take on turking and on the gold farms in particular is that it is just a new economy take on old economy exploitation. Labour activists and lawyers point to the total lack of workers’ rights. Rebecca Smith, a lawyer for the National Employment Law Project says:

The creativity of business in avoiding its responsibility to workers never ceases to astound. It’s day labor in the virtual world.

The workers themselves take a more relaxed view — arguing that it’s basically badly paid Sudoku. According to one, “I think it’s something of a hybrid between trying to make money on the side and a diversion, a substitute for doing a crossword puzzle. It’s sort of a mental exercise.”

MTV news has recently succeeded in getting hold of the first footage shot inside Chinese gold farms. According to the segment, half a million Chinese now make a living from the acquisition and sale of World of Warcraft gold to US and EU gamers. GigaOM has an interview with the filmmaker, Ge Jin:

GigaOM: What does WoW gold farming suggest about the future of work?

GJ: I think these gold farms indicate that the game platform has the potential to engage more people in Internet-driven economy. The gaming workers in China don’t have skills like English, software or graphic design to participate in other forms of Internet-driven work, but they can communicate and navigate in a 3D game world whose tools and routines they are familiar with… So if more social and economic activities happen in an accessible 3D game world, people who don’t have access to other culture capital but gaming knowledge will be more likely to be included in global interaction.

It makes you wonder if all those $100 laptops for kids aren’t actually going to bridge the digital divide but instead create a whole new economy of third-world labour.

Turking story source and quotes from Salon.

The Mt. Clements Public Library switched off its internet access this Monday, because people were using the computers to look at pornography. Library Director Donald Worrell said, “Where the terminals are located it’s quite possible that children and young families can see this. It’s totally inappropriate.” The library claims that it isn’t practical to just move the terminals (to a top shelf?) and that instead it is working with its attorneys to find a way to bring the public library back online.

Source: WXYZ via Techdirt.

We’re just going to post their press release:

At the end of November, the bar formerly known as Pop will begin to get taken apart before being refurbished early in the New Year. In the short period before it gets a much-needed facelift (late Nov ‘til late Jan), the people behind Heavenly Recordings/The Social/Socialism Magazine will programme two months of gigs and clubs to accompany the usual hard drinking we’re contemplating over the Christmas & New Year period. In the blink and you’ve missed it spirit of the original Heavenly Sunday Social at The Albany, the bar, to be rechristened Everything Must Go, will exist only for a limited period in the vein of the legions of temporary Christmas shops that spring up all around town. The promotions aim to reflect this slightly deranged idea, musically covering all bases from freak folk to pounding amyl disco and all points in between. Added to this will be work by designers, painters and video artists covering each of the wall surfaces, creating a temporary exhibition space that will disappear forever when the venue goes dark in the New Year. Saturday daytimes in December (2pm ‘til 7pm) will be given over to a four week only Christmas Market hosted by Socialism Magazine – stalls will be run by our favourite photographers, artists, clothing and jewellery designers alongside the Rough Trade Record shop. These market days will be accompanied by one deck DJs, the occasional live band and a full showing of R Kelly’s legendary musical soap opera “Trapped In The Closet”. Everything Must Go will open on November 24th. It will close in January. Launch party on Friday 24th with the heavenly jukebox djs, Pete fowler and friends and some special live guests. Open to all from 7pm Shows throughout December from Dot Allison, Lisa Germano, Xerox Teens, Foals, Lost Penguin, The Hours, Ed Harcourt and all manner of clubnights to keep an eye out for including of course SEAN ROWLEY’S GUILTY CHRISTMAS with the Guilty Pleasures djs Thursday 30th nov, 7th Dec, 14th Dec, 21st Dec. Artwork on display/being created throughout December by Pete Fowler (Monsterism) Jon Burgerman, Ian Stevenson, David Henckel and plently more.

Jill Greenberg’s hyper-realised photos of kids crying caused a mini-storm a whle back in the States and the UK. Critics accused the artist — who confessed to tactics such as taking sweets off the children to make them cry — of child abuse. The Guardian reported at the time:

When photographer Jill Greenberg decided to take a lollipop away from a small child, she had a broader purpose in mind.

“The first little boy I shot, Liam, suddenly became hysterically upset,” the Los Angeles-based photographer said. “It reminded me of helplessness and anger I feel about our current political and social situation.”

As the 27 two- and three-year-olds featured in her exhibition, End Times, cried and screamed, demanding the return of the lollipop given to them just moments before, Greenberg snapped away.

The results have provoked a storm of criticism from bloggers. “Jill Greenberg is a sick woman who should be arrested and charged with child abuse,” wrote Andrew Peterson on the Thomas Hawk blog.”

Funny then that the same idea (and maybe the same artist — unattributed or not) should turn up in ads for an Italian restaurant in Shanghai.

Ogilvy & Mather Shanghai ad for Italian restaurant chain Gondola Veneziana:

Jill Greenberg’s End Times series:

…

I don’t mind anyone drinking in front of me now, but they can’t chop lines in front of me. They just can’t do it. I don’t know. I always used to hate lines. I remember hanging out with Liam Gallagher years ago and he was doing blow in front of me and I was like, “Can’t you just stop?”. He was like, “Do it, do it!” and I was hating that shit. Then when I got to be 35 years old I started doing it and I didn’t stop for, like, four years. Explain that! Isn’t that weird? Starting at 35? Having never done it before. Because to me cocaine was always a more bourgeois thing, or it was for dumb metalheads. Then after I became a film actor I was around fashion a lot. So you’d be sitting there with, like, [two supermodels] and they’d be naked and there’d be a Jackson Pollock on the wall and a Picasso on the wall and you’d be in a $100,000 couture gown, and I remember calling up my old bass player Melissa [Auf Der Mar] and saying, “OK, I’m going to try cocaine. We’re going to be Scarface. There’s a guy who keeps walking in with a platinum plate and platinum straws and offering me coke, so let’s just go for it.” We did it. We did it for two days non-stop with some of the richest people in the world and some of the most beautiful people in the world and we ended up at six in the morning outside a club called Twilo with Dave Navarro in little silver shorts going, “Let’s go get some smack.” I mean, this is a downward spiral however you slice it.

From the current issue of Pop which also features a nice Madonna/Mondino tribute cover shot. Towleroad has also noticed some madonna-isms in the shoot.

A five-time Academy Award nominee for best director, most recently for 2001′s Gosford Park, Altman finally won a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2006.

“No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have,” Altman said while accepting the award. “I’m very fortunate in my career. I’ve never had to direct a film I didn’t choose or develop. My love for filmmaking has given me an entree to the world and to the human condition.”

Obituary at Seattle Pi.

New figures, released this week, are expected to show that almost 8,000 people were diagnosed with HIV last year, increasing the number of people living with the virus in the UK to around 70,000. Around a third of people with HIV are unaware that they are carrying the virus and there is fresh concern that people may now be carrying a cocktail of STDs, including HIV, chlamydia, syphilis and gonorrhoea. The annual report of the Health Protection Agency is expected to also highlight the rise in infection amongst heterosexuals. Around two-thirds of heterosexuals with HIV acquired the infection abroad, primarily in Africa.

The Terrence Higgins Trust said too many people in the West were taking risks because they felt HIV was a treatable disease and that this lessened the chances of contracting it. The UK government have just launched a TV campaign warning young people of the risks of unprotected sex. One in five under-24s say they do not take condoms with them on a night out.

Source: The Independent via Towleroad.

According to the Financial Times‘ How to Spend It supplement, investment bankers are now getting into DJing:

… with the explosion of clubbing culture and people genuinely feeling younger for longer, people are taking to DJing later in life. Bankers and lawyers who might annually let off steam in resorts such as Ibiza now want to be able to take to the decks themselves at after-hours villa parties.

Point Blank Music College is currently running intensive DJ and production courses for the be-suited ‘professional market’. Ali Marij, an investment banker for IMG and a Conservative candidate hopeful, is an alumni. He says of a recent gig — the Conservative Party’s Black and White ball:

I played some great US funky house music rather than Dancing Queen, which they’re more used to at Tory balls. One of the best things I did in that set was to play The Weekend, a track by Michael Gray, with Margaret Thatcher’s ‘This lady’s not for turning’ speech over the top. It was great — all these lords were jumping around going crazy for it.

Aaaargh.

Following on from the music industry’ discovery that music downloaders are mainly fans who can market their music for them (like, duh), CBS has become the latest TV network to realise that allowing people to download TV shows actually makes the content more sticky and compelling.

TV.com reports that a poll taken by CBS shows that over half of the users who have streamed CBS shows on the Web had never seen the shows before on TV. The network says that the new users then became fans of those shows.

CBS says this data will help it and the other networks in their efforts to monetize Web content. The more new people who watch shows at the network sites, the better ad rates the networks can command.

“We’re looking at this as a key change in direction for us now and looking at our programming as dual distribution programming–over the air and on the Internet,” CBS Corp. research chief David Poltrack told reporters today.

The networks are also following the fans in using the web to provoke interest in cancelled shows. Clearly they’ve noticed all the fan lobbying trying to get such shows back on the air. Also witness HBO’s experiments with longtail program, The Wire, as a way to tickle interest in its forthcoming IPTV channel. As we’ve said before, go with this guys not against it (that means you Universal Music) — it’ll be much easier for everyone.

Story via Techdirt.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of Leigh Bowery looking how we feel. The BBC also has some lovely footage of the Taboo icon shopping for The Clothes Show. Happy Autumn.

We love a bit of search subversion. In this latest story of When Search Goes Bad, the Parents Television Council (PTC) has removed its search function after discovering that it had been used to promote the very same TV shows that the PTC regularly condemn.

The search function at parentstv.org was showing up sponsored links to shows along with the site’s archived content criticising televised sex, violence and profanity during prime time. According to Broadcasting & Cable,

So a search for, say, Without a Trace — a CBS show that has been hit with a proposed multimillion-dollar FCC fine, thanks to PTC member complaints — would yield a list of critical articles topped by a prominent link pitching downloads of Trace episodes so you ‘don’t miss your favorite primetime TV shows on the CBS Network.’

Likewise, a search for FX’s Rescue Me would get you the headline “PTC Outraged Over Graphic Rape Scenes on FX’s Rescue Me” — and a helpful link advertising: “Low Prices on Rescue Me. Qualified Orders Over $25 Ship Free.”

Last week, however, the search feature disappeared. Because “the ads frequently listed things that were contradictory to our mission,” explains PTC spokeswoman Kelly Oliver, the “free search service” was removed from the site Nov. 6.

Story via Gawker.

About 4,000 gay men, lesbians and civil rights supporters gathered today at the Hebrew University stadium for Jerusalem Pride. Security was tight in the city with 3,000 Israeli police drafted in to stop clashes between the demonstrators and orthodox Jews.

The participants were allowed to party but not march. About 30 gay protesters who tried to march illegally through the city where arrested by Israeli police.

The proposed march was cancelled by Israeli police on Thursday after Palestinian threats to strike in Israel after the shelling in Gaza in which 18 Palestinian civilians were killed. Event organisers agreed to move the event to the stadium after Israeli police said they needed to divert forces to deal with the security threat.

Ultra-orthodox Jews clashed with Israeli police earlier this week after calling for the march to be cancelled saying it defiled the holy city.

The proposed march was also criticised by the Muslim and Christian religious communities.

The Vatican called for it to be scrapped for fear of offending “the sensibilities of religious communities”.

Story via the BBC.

Photo from Harryu’s Flickr photostream.

The BBC is reporting that a video showing two LAPD officers beating up a suspect has been posted on YouTube. The video shows two officers punching William Cardenas in the face and pinning him to the ground with a knee to the neck, while he struggles. The incident in Hollywood occurred in August and was filmed by a local. A report by the two officers said Mr Cardenas resisted arrest and they feared he would try to grab their guns.

As reported on the LAPD blog [which -- props to them -- clearly states that it moderates comments but has left a lot of critical ones up], Los Angeles police chief William Bratton described the footage as disturbing but said an investigation had to be carried out to decide whether or not the use of force was appropriate.

“There’s no denying that the video is disturbing,” Mr Bratton said. “But as to whether the actions of the officers were appropriate in light of what they were experiencing and the totality of the circumstances is what the investigation will determine.”

Hoax or not (and this story is being carried by Indymedia as well as the BBC), somewhat sinisterly, comments had been disabled for the footage that we found purporting to be of the incident. Is this more evidence of Google locking YouTube down?

UPDATE: a video has now appeared of a recent incident where a UCLA student was tasered by police in the university library. Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a UCLA student, was repeatedly stunned with a Taser and then taken into custody when he did not exit the CLICC Lab in Powell Library in a timely manner. Community Service Officers had asked Tabatabainejad to leave after he failed to produce his BruinCard during a random check at around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Expect much more of this kind of sousveillance turning up on YouTube . Story via PerezHilton, of all places.

Publishers are trying to gain the attention of a young audience by sending books to cell phones and flashing the text before users’ eyes one word at a time. Launched in England less than a year ago, ICUE software lets users read novels on their cell phone without the irritation (to some) of constantly scrolling through heaps of text on a small screen. Instead, the text is flashed on the screen one word (or phrase) at a time. It’s positioning? Moving the way you read. This is clever stuff — a product following the consumer, not the other way around.

The application (like lots of other cool stuff) was originally developed by the military. It is based on the tachistoscope, a rapid image recognition device that was invented by the US Air Force and first used to train pilots to recognise enemy planes from a distance. The device was later used to teach speed-reading techniques.

ICUE currently has some 10,000 customers and claim that their audience are used to digesting content in this way (advertisers and content owners take note) because they already spend hours staring at rapidly moving images of video games. According to ICUE managing director Jane Tappuni,

Our customers are split between business and tech-orientated readers and, obviously, teenagers. It’s the 16 year olds who are using us the most because they are the ones who are on their mobiles the most. Their reading is split between the classic list that has to do with what they’re reading in school and the contemporary list.

ICUE has already brokered deals with mobile books with major publishers like HarperCollins, Pan MacMillan and Pearson. Interestingly, the company plans to launch in the US only once it has cracked the UK market because – in mobile terms — it is so much more developed:

The UK is 18 months to two years ahead of the US cellular market. Only 35 percent of Americans have sent a text message, as compared to almost 100 percent in the UK.

Tappuni says that 80 percent of users who download ICUE and view the demo text go on to buy ebooks and that she often hears from teachers interested in making ICUE books available to their classes. After all, those kids are glued to their mobile screens already.

Source: MIT’s Technology Review.

A recent essay by Grant McKracken argues that digital photography, enhanced by sound recording, geotagging and folksonomies, will transform the intimate, ill-remembered ‘Kodak moment’ from a blurry family heirloom, to key documentation of our fragmented identities:

[...] there is a deeper, more pressing value add here that is not much talked about. As change increases and dynamism quickens, individuals will need to have archival data for personal and practical reasons. There was a point in my life when it was possible to say that I had changed jobs, cities, addresses, relationships or perspectives once every six months. (I know this seems preposterous but I think if you sit down and do a “identity chronology” of your own you will see this number or something like it.) This is an awful lot of water under the bridge. The task of reconstruction is now, well, daunting. What would I give for 10 perfectly documented photos for each of those 6 month periods?

Digital ‘arm-chair anthropology’ (McKracken’s term) is in the air at the moment. A much-quoted recent posting elsewhere on the archaeological benefits of the Wikipedia points out that

The Wikipedia is the most detailed, comprehensive, concise, culturally-sensitive record of how humanity understands itself at any precise moment in time.

Viewed in this light, when the Wikipedia is “inaccurate” due to bias or limited understanding rather than simple error, it becomes more interesting because it is inaccurate. Looked at from this perspective, the word “inaccurate” ceases to have any meaning, because the Wikipedia is being used to determine how we see the world, and not whether that view is “accurate” in any empirical sense. In this light, the more accurate an entry is, the less useful and interesting it becomes. And, of course, what those that contribute to a given entry have found to be worth including is most interesting of all. [...]

Since the Wikipedia exists in many non-identical, language-based independent editions, each of which is constantly changing, all of the editions taken together provide a real-time record of not only how our perception of ourselves morphs over time, but how that perception differs culturally around the world as well.

With personal anthropology explicitly in mind, The BBC’s prototype The Time When site enables the public to hook memorable personal events into a collaborative, RSS-able ‘digital oral history’. And of course, there’s the granddaddy of all online archaeological tools — Archive.Org’s Wayback Machine.

Seems that it’s taken the first ten years of the popular Web for people to realise that the digital world isn’t an ephemeral, weightless Now, but another medium on which history — personal and public — inscribes its long shadow. For future anthropologists, arm-chair or otherwise, the beauty and challenge of the early Digital Age technologies will be in the rich access they provide to our individual little worlds as they stood shortly after the ‘End of History’. Dig deep.

[A footnote: maybe the zeitgeisty fascination with personal timelines is the logical progression of what we've been calling NOWstalgia. We have increasingly easy long-tail access to the media that soundtracks the intimate histories of our generation. It's only natural that we desire to string those remembered jewels on the narrative threads of our own stories. Give it a year and literary agents will be optioning personal-timeline memoirs with the same zest currently reserved for this week's star sex-blogger or 'blogging copper'. Just you wait.]